Develop Web Apps Entirely in Swift with the Kitura Framework for Linux on IBM z Systems

Introduction

Kitura is a free and open source web framework, completely written in the Swift language, that is constantly evolving to deliver more ability. Built to offer everything you need to get your Swift web app deployed quickly and easily on Linux, Kitura includes a web server with FastCGI support, as well as all essential libraries.

If you’re developing an iOS app, you don’t need to use different languages for the front-end and back-end portions – write both in Swift to simplify application development. This empowers you to own the end-to-end solution and work as part of an autonomous team to develop fast and memory-conserving programs in this easy-to-write and safe language. No longer do front-end and back-end developers need to be separate teams or even separate people who must hand off work to each other.

Kitura is the first Swift web framework that supports deploying to the powerful, secure and resilient Linux on IBM z Systems, also known as LinuxONE. Your clients will experience faster response time, better security and fewer outages than on other Linux servers.

Your Kitura web app will benefit from storing your application data and Swift back-end together on a LinuxONE mainframe, which provides better performance, security, and resiliency over x86-based servers.

Read on to learn more:

Deploy swifter Swift apps on the mainframe with Kitura

The term mainframe tends to invoke ideas about archaic, difficult-to-use, expensive, space-consuming, and obsolete technology that can’t run modern applications. However, IBM is actively developing modern, easy-to-use, affordable, and compact mainframes that are used much more than you might think.

The latest z13 servers (first introduced in 2015) were specifically designed with mobile apps in mind. Your Linux experience on the mainframe will be much the same as your Linux experience on x86 – gone are the days when using a mainframe requires a “green screen” – modern graphical interfaces are available. LinuxONE mainframes are about the size of a refrigerator and come with a financing model that allows you to have either flavour of LinuxONE (Emperor or Rockhopper) on site, but only pay for the resources you use.

Mainframes are very much present in modern life – you might have read stats before about the enormous volume of tweets (8k per second), and Google Searches (60k per second), but have you heard that there is 350k mainframe business transactions per second worldwide? You might not realize it, but the processing power and concurrency of mainframes are essential to many things we take for granted in daily life such as making purchases with our credit cards or checking into a flight. Mainframes are perfectly suited to handle both modern and legacy applications.

Use your favourite web templates with Kitura

Templates are a great way to separate your website’s code from its design. While other web frameworks support the popular Mustache web templating system, Kitura also supports the Markdown and Stencil templating systems. Find examples of templating here.

Get started now with a Kitura application

IBM Toolkit for Swift – Linux on z Systems, released in March 2017, has a sample Swift web app that was created with the Kitura web framework. To get started, you can check out that sample application, or else follow along with a tutorial like “Build End-to-End Cloud Apps using Swift with Kitura”.

You might consider using IBM Toolkit for Swift – Linux on z Systems to simplify your development process by using the other contents of the toolkit: Swift 3.0 compiler, Swift Runtime, Swift Core Libraries, Swift LLDB debugger, and Swift Package Manager. Once your application is ready, you might also want to try deploying your production application on IBM Cloud.